The Year of Confusion(4)

“For the sake of convenience and respect for tradition, the twelve months will retain their customary names, even though some of these make little sense. Your most ancient calendar had only ten months, and those months named fifth through tenth are now the seventh through twelfth months.”

“True, ‘December’ just means ‘number ten,’ but we’ve been using the names so long that they are just sounds to us. Nobody notices the illogic.”

At that moment a slave summoned us to the midday meal, which was served on tables brought out from one of the temple buildings. We sat while one of the astronomers, who was a priest of Apollo, pronounced a simple invocation and poured a libation to that beneficent deity, and we launched into an austere meal of bread, cheese, and sliced fruit. The wine was, of course, heavily watered.

“Sosigenes,” I said, “something strikes me as odd here.”

“What might that be?” he asked.

“The fact that the year is arranged so haphazardly. Nothing seems to be very precise or consistent. There are the seemingly random numbers involved. Why 365 days, of all things? Why not a nice, even number easily divisible by a hundred? Then, why the disparity in the very length of the day, so that you end up with a partial day at the end of each year? We expect sloppy work from our fellow men. You’d think the gods would do better work.”

“This is a topic much debated,” Sosigenes admitted.

“There is some belief,” said the old fellow named Demades, “that human convenience is not of great concern to the gods.”

“Yet,” said the pseudo-Babylonian, “the cosmos seems to work according to rules of great complexity and precision, if we can just discover what those rules are.”

“That is the task of philosophers,” said another.

“I thought,” I put in, “that philosophers were primarily concerned with the correct way to live.”

“That is one field,” said Demades, “but from the earliest times, philosophers have delved into the workings of the universe. Even ancient Heraclitus speculated upon these things.”

“And,” said the would-be Babylonian, “even in that early time, philosophers concurred that the gods who created the universe are not the childish immortals of Homer, delighting in bloodshed and seducing mortal women and forever playing pranks upon each other. The true deity is far more majestic than that.”

“‘Deity’?” I said. “You mean there is only one? Yet our priest here just invoked Apollo.”

“What Polasser means,” said Sosigenes, “is that a great many philosophers maintain that there is a single divine principal, and that what we call the gods are the various aspects of that divinity. There is neither disrespect nor illogic in honoring these aspects in the convenient guise of superior persons who take human form. Thus is worship made far more simple for mere mortals. The true deity must be of a grandeur so vast that the puny efforts of mortals to communicate with him must seem futile.”

“You’re getting too deep for me,” I told them, “but as long as you don’t insult the gods of Rome, I won’t protest.”

“We would never insult anyone’s gods,” said Demades. “After all, it is likely that all peoples honor the same deity, just in differing forms.”

To tell the truth, this sort of talk always made me uncomfortable. It isn’t so much that I failed to recognize the childishness of certain of our myths. It was just that, knowing how difficult it can be to understand our fellow men, it seemed presumptuous to try to understand the nature of the gods, singular or plural, and we all know how angry the gods can get at presumption on the part of mortals.

“So,” I asked, “when is this new calendar supposed to go into effect?”

“On the first day of January. Of course, Caesar in his capacity as pontifex maximus will proclaim exactly which day that will be.”

“Any time soon?”

“In seven days.”

I almost choked on a mouthful of bread. “Seven days!” I cried when I could speak. “But January is three months away!”

“Not any more. Surely you had noticed that we are well into winter, despite the name of the month, which customarily begins the season of autumn.”

“Well, the calendar has gotten shamefully out of joint. Still, what is to happen to those three months?”

“They will just disappear,” Sosigenes said. “Caesar has abolished them. Instead, the next year will have 445 days, with three extra months inserted as Caesar shall decree. This will be a unique year and all subsequent years shall be of 365 days as described.”